Incestuous Relations in Bessie Head and Sindiwe Magona
The Perversion of Apartheid and the Migrant Labour System
Abstract
Apartheid and the migrant labour system affected the residential stability of black South African families in terms of wife-husband and father-child relations. The control exerted by apartheid laws made it impossible for generations of fathers for over one and a half centuries to raise their children (Wilson, 2006), affecting their personal and social behaviour. This article contends that in their use of literature as a political tool, writers Sindiwe Magona and Bessie Head offered a similar vision about the father-daughter relationship. Magona’s short story “It was Easter Sunday the day I went to Netreg” (1991) and Head’s short story “The Cardinals” (1995) portray a daughter and a father who do not know each other and who, years later and unknowingly, establish a sexual relation. This article will claim these incestuous relationships can be interpreted as the writers’ representation of the use and abuse the state exerted on its black citizens.
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